"The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred."
—George Bancroft, Address, Historical Society, New York, 1854

Choices...will you make your own or let someone make them for you?

Welcome!!!!!

Hello! And thank you for stopping by. The articles on this site are some of the issues that are very close to my heart. They each demonstrate how life is a series of choices. Every one of them deals with making choices and accepting the responsibility for that choice. Even the act of not choosing is in itself a choice— one which will often leave you reacting to life and/or the actions of others instead of acting as you choose.

That said, I must include a word of warning here. The topics and issues that will be discussed in the following paragraphs/pages will be controversial and I imagine I will ruffle a lot of feathers and make some people very angry. That's not really my intention. I simply want to demonstrate other ways of looking at things that may or may not have crossed your mind before. Far too often nowadays, people are content to let others do their thinking for them. A nicely packaged proposition will get an okay from a majority of people without them having given any thought to the deeper ramifications of the issue being debated. The intent of these pages is to hopefully offer some hints and suggestions as to how to look below the surface gloss to find the truth that is lying beneath it. It
is my sincere hope that the fact that you may disagree with one or two of my ideas will not prevent you from reading these pages with an open mind.

Perhaps I can illustrate what I'm talking about by referring to commercials that we see on TV all the time. We all know that there is supposed to be truth in
advertising and the letter of the law may be being followed, but often the spirit of the law is being ignored. Let's take a popular over-the-counter pain
medication for example. According to their commercial, no other brand of this medicine works better. And I'm sure that is true since they must follow the letter of the law. But what they fail to tell you is that the generic store brand, which sells for half the price, works just as well!!! That is where they fail to follow the spirit of the law. It is probably the best selling over-the-counter pain medication because millions of people don't look past the surface gloss (nothing works better) to see the truth beneath (there are many other things that work just as well).

Today's movers and shakers in business, politics and even religion have learned how to capitalize on the general trend to look at what is presented and not what is hidden by the presentation. What it all comes down to is influencing the choices we make in life. EVERYTHING WE DO IS A CHOICE!!!!!! We MUST learn
how to choose more wisely or we risk losing what has taken many generations to create— a society where race, gender, nationality, orientation, size, weight, etc. don't matter. Well, ideally don't matter.

One of the first "recorded" acts of human beings (if you believe the Bible is a historical/allegorical account of mankind) was to make a choice: Eve chose to eat the fruit from Tree of Knowledge. Belief in an omnipotent Divine Creator necessitates the belief that this Creator knew what Eve's choice would be and made no effort to stop her. Therefore, the right to choose our own path, even if it goes against the desires of the Creator, is the Divine right of every human being. But what if one does not know that there is an option to choose?

Adam and Eve were both told not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And neither of them had the slightest inkling to do so until the Serpent told them they had the option of disobeying God. Until they were aware they had such an option, they were unable to exercise their free will because there was nothing to choose between. Before the serpent presented them with a second choice, there was only one path to take. If there is only one path to take, then free will is meaningless. Therefore, the presentation of another option by the serpent was necessary in order to allow mankind to make use of the Divine gift of free will.

Certainly God him/herself could not present man with this choice— had he/she done so, no matter what path one chose, one could say they were following the will of God. So God needed someone to act as the choice giver. Someone to point out to mankind the options available to him. Lucifer, whose name means giver of light, accepted this job. Lucifer "enlightened" mankind that they had the choice of acting selfishly or of acting out of Love. In fulfilling this task, Lucifer is simply fulfilling the Divine will: allowing mankind the freedom to choose to return to God and follow the path of Love rather than the path of selfishness.

Lucifer has been demonized, literally, by countless generations of humans. But just as the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot was necessary to the fulfillment of Jesus' "destiny", so is Lucifer's temptation of man necessary to the fulfillment of mankind's ultimate destiny. For without a choice, we have no free will. And with no free will, we cannot be held accountable for our actions. Without a choice, we are no more than puppets of the Divine Mind following a course of predestined actions. The acts of puppets are the responsibility of the puppeteer, not the puppet itself. Without Lucifer, there would be no "sin" because sin involves willfully violating the laws of God. Without a choice, there is no sin.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not advocating worship of Lucifer in any way. To do so would be to willfully worship the selfish nature of mankind and in doing so only delay our return to the Divine Creator. But I am suggesting that we recognize Lucifer for what he really is: an angel doing a necessary, albeit unpleasant, task. It is my belief that when each and every one of us chooses to follow the path of Love, the Creator will turn to Lucifer, say, "Job well done, my child. Welcome home."

In each of the following pages, issues are discussed in which you will someday be forced to make a choice whether to support or oppose laws regulating each issue. You may abdicate such a choice by not voting, but even that is making a choice in which you agree to abide by the laws, no matter what your views on them are. So, the choice is up to you: to choose for yourself or to let someone else choose for you. Please read the following pages carefully and give the ideas presented in them time to grow. I'm not asking you to agree with them, but please do not dismiss them without due consideration.

Thanks for stopping by and please come back again as new issues are brought up. If you encounter a link problem, please email me and let me know so I can fix it.